Category Archives: Politics

Getting things into perspective

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The terrible thing about atrocities is that they cause us to lose our judgement just when we need it most. We saw it with 9/11 — but, interestingly, much less with the 7/7 bombings in London. The events in Paris are terrible, but they took place in a context, and it will be the context that decides what happens in the coming months and years.

That’s why it was good to see Adam Shatz’s piece in the LRB today:

Already, anyone who dares to examine the causes of the massacre, the reasons the Kouachi brothers drifted into jihadist violence, is being warned that to do so is to excuse the real culprit, radical Islam: ‘an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades’, as George Packer wrote on the New Yorker blog. Packer says this is no time to talk about the problem of integration in France, or about the wars the West has waged in the Middle East for the last two decades. Radical Islam, and only radical Islam, is to blame for the atrocities. We are in what the New Yorker critic George Trow called the ‘context of no context’, where jihadi atrocities can be safely laid at the door of an evil ideology, and any talk of pre-emptive war, torture and racism amounts to apologia for atrocities.

We have been here before: the 11 September attacks led many liberal intellectuals to become laptop bombardiers, and to smear those, such as Susan Sontag, who reminded readers that American policies in the Middle East had not won us many friends. The slogan ‘je suis Charlie Hebdo’ expresses a peculiar nostalgia for 11 September, for the moment before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, before Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, before all the things that did so much to tarnish America’s image and to muddy the battle lines. In saying ‘je suis Charlie Hebdo’, we can feel innocent again. Thanks to the massacre in Paris, we can forget the Senate torture report, and rally in defence of the West in good conscience.

The other interesting fallout of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity is that Sam Huntingdon’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis will get a new lease of life.

Getting your excuses in early

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The great Irish second-row forward, Willie John McBride, was famous for his strategy of “getting your retaliation in first”. Now the head of one of Britain’s security agencies has adapted the idea for modern circumstances: get your excuses in early.

The head of MI5, Andrew Parker, has called for new powers to help fight Islamist extremism, warning of a dangerous imbalance between increasing numbers of terrorist plots against the UK and a drop in the capabilities of intelligence services to snoop on communications.

Parker described the Paris attack as “a terrible reminder of the intentions of those who wish us harm” and said he had spoken to his French counterparts to offer help.

Speaking to an invited audience at MI5 headquarters, he said the threat level to Britain had worsened and Islamist extremist groups in Syria and Iraq were directly trying to orchestrate attacks on the UK. An attack on the UK was “highly likely” and MI5 could not give a guarantee it would be able to stop it, he said.

“Strikingly, working with our partners, we have stopped three UK terrorist plots in recent months alone,” he said. “Deaths would certainly have resulted otherwise. Although we and our partners try our utmost, we know that we cannot hope to stop everything.”

The hidden agenda of the speech is, of course, to ensure that surveillance capabilities of the security and intelligence agencies are not constrained by any namby-pamby concerns about privacy and civil liberties. (The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament is currently completing an investigation following the Snowden revelations. Having given evidence to the inquiry, I do not expect much change, but senior securocrats never leave anything to chance.)

Parker’s speech has had the desired impact on UK media — respectful, overly-credulous media coverage, with the BBC Today Programme asserting that we are all “nervous” as a result of what’s happened in Paris. Sir Malcolm Rifkind — the Chairman of the ISC Committee and Parker’s ostensible overseer — added his voice to the chorus, asserting that the two Paris attackers must have been communicating with Yemen; the implication was that these communications ought to have been monitored and intercepted. Which led one to wonder how Rifkind knew this. But his message was clear: don’t mess with our surveillance capabilities.

So far, the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo massacre has followed the standard pattern: terrorist atrocity –> outrage –> massive publicity –> calls for more surveillance and more resources for intelligence agencies. One wonders when it will occur to people that this is a positive feedback loop (aka a vicious circle). Given the statistical probability that there will be more atrocities, and that the security services will miss some of them (as the MI5 chief predicts), we’re heading for a full-blown national security state. In which case Bin Laden will have won, hands down.

Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. Maybe it’d be worth trying a different approach to these terrorist threats. As Paul Bernal puts it:

If the resources – time, money, energy, intelligence – currently put into mass surveillance systems that are unproven, have huge and damaging side-effect, and are even potentially counterproductive, were, instead, devoted to a more intelligent, targeted approach, it might even be that counterterrorism is more effective. We should be looking for new ways, not going down paths that are costly in both financial and human terms.

The fundamental problem is that terrorism, by its very nature, is hard to deal with. That’s something we have to face up to – and not try to look for silver bullets. No amount of technology, no level of surveillance, will solve that fundamental problem. We shouldn’t pretend that it can.

Paris: the by-product

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Right on cue: General Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA, commenting on the Paris killings.

MICHAEL HAYDEN: Let me be a little dark here: there really are no solutions, this is a condition. We can manage the condition better, we can make these attacks somewhat less likely or lethal but without changing the character of our society we can’t make them go away all together. Let me add another thought: About 12 months ago I talked about these massive amounts of metadata the NSA held in storage, that metadata doesn’t look all that scary this morning. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the French services pick up cell phones related to the attack and ask the Americans where have you seen these phones active globally.

The Paris massacre: journalism is in the front line, but what kind of journalism?

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Interesting comment by Charlie Beckett.

What struck me was how weird it is that these people — and they do deserve the label ‘terrorist’ — have struck against cartoonists. Not drone manufacturers or military bases, diplomats, politicians or financiers, but satirists. It shows what we should have already known. That journalism is part of the ideological war. It is the front-line.

That makes it all the more important that journalists respond thoughtfully and responsibly. I am not going to tell editors what they should publish in relation to this story. But it would be good if their response is in the best tradition of liberal, positive journalism and not just an angry, lashing out that feeds the fear that helps sustain those who perpetrate the violence.

On the other hand, commenting on the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2011, the Time Bureau Chief in Paris at the time wrote this:

It’s obvious free societies cannot simply give in to hysterical demands made by members of any beyond-the-pale group. And it’s just as clear that intimidation and violence must be condemned and combated for whatever reason they’re committed—especially if their goal is to undermine freedoms and liberties of open societies. But it’s just evident members of those same free societies have to exercise a minimum of intelligence, calculation, civility and decency in practicing their rights and liberties—and that isn’t happening when a newspaper decides to mock an entire faith on the logic that it can claim to make a politically noble statement by gratuitously pissing people off.

Imbecility rules ok?

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Appearances notwithstanding, we are not governed by imbeciles. Our problem is that we are governed by unscrupulous politicians who see imbecility as the way to the voter’s heart. Step forward Theresa May, the current Miss Whiplash of the Tory front bench, who wants a solemn commitment in the next Tory Manifesto to expel all foreign graduate students after they graduate and make them apply from abroad for visas to work in the UK. Yes, you read that correctly. She wants to force bright young foreigners, who come to do research degrees in the UK because we have some great universities, to leave the moment they become available for work in our knowledge-based industries.

Here’s how James Dyson, the entrepreneur and inventor puts it:

Train ’em up. Kick ’em out. It’s a bit shortsighted, isn’t it? A short-term vote winner that leads to long-term economic decline. Of course the government needs to be seen to be “doing something”. But postgraduate research in particular leads to exportable, patentable technology. Binning foreign postgraduates is, I suppose, a quick fix. But quick fixes don’t build long-term futures. And that’s exactly what many researchers are doing.

Bright sparks are drawn to the UK for good reason – our universities are among the best in the world. Particularly for science and engineering. Yet the Home Office wants to say cheerio to these sharp minds as soon as their mortarboards land on college lawns. The moment research is finished students are forced back to their homelands, from where the home secretary is happy to allow them to apply for jobs in Britain. Not exactly motivating. Not exactly practical. This is an abrupt departure from an equally unworkable idea that after their research they have two months to be employed, otherwise they are ejected. No wonder fewer than 10% bother to try to stay.

Our borders must remain open to the world’s best. Give them our knowledge, allow them to develop their own and permit them to apply it on our shores. Their ideas and inventiveness will create technology to export around the world.

The interesting question, of course, is why Miss Whiplash thinks that her daft policy idea will be a vote-winner in a closely-fought election? The logical inference is that she thinks that voters are imbeciles. In which case she is following in the footsteps of one of her heroes, Winston Churchill, who famously observed that “the best argument against democracy is five minutes’ conversation with the average voter”.

Sigh.

Could Facebook be a factor in the next election?

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This morning’s Observer column:

There are two things about 2015 of which one can be reasonably certain: there will be a general election in May and it’s unlikely to produce an overall majority for either of the two big parties. In those circumstances, small, localised events might have big implications: a Ukip candidate shoots his mouth off about, er, non-white people; a Labour candidate turns out to have an embarrassing past; a Tory garagiste cannot differentiate between sexual harassment and bum pinching. The kind of stuff, in other words, that could affect the outcome in a finely balanced constituency.

Which brings us to social media and the question of whether the 2015 general election could be the first one in which the outcome is affected by what goes on there. Could Facebook, for example, be a factor in determining the outcome of some local constituency battles?

Far-fetched? Maybe. But the question is worth asking because in the 2010 US congressional elections, Facebook conducted an interesting experiment in social engineering, which made some of us sit up…

Read on

What’s really wrong with the economy

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Great blog post by Mariana Mazzucato. Excerpt:

To reduce inequality, its not enough to consider the power of redistributive taxation or handounts, like Renzi’s ’80 euro monthly bonus’. It is essential to tackle the more intrinsic problems of corporate governance which have allowed profit wage levels to sore to record levels, leaving wages falling behind. It is indeed this point that brings us to the second problem. The notion that big bad finance must be somehow tamed in order to rebalance the economy to good old industry, ignores how sick the real economy has become. Industry itself has become financialised, focussing too much on ‘hoarding cash’ (at record levels) and/or spending on areas that boost short term stock prices (thus stock options and executive pay), than on long run areas like R&D and human capital formation. Indeed, Since 2003 Fortune 500 companies have spent 3 trillion dollars on share buybacks, often justifying these with the excuse that there are ‘no investment opportunities’. Yet a look at the largest buy-backers (pharma and oil) reveals that these are in two sectors yearning for investment in new opportunities: health and renewables. And as I show in my work, it has been a select group of public sector institutions in the world, that have been spending the most on these opportunities rather than the sick and financialised private sector.

Thus it is urgent for industrial policy, which is finally becoming fashionable again, to not simply throw support to certain firms and sectors, such as IT or ‘life sciences’, but ask companies within these and other sectors to be part of the reform that is needed. Instead we are witnessing the opposite: sycophant governments bending backwards to unquestioningly please the ‘growth’ requests of big business, and a widespread attack on workers rights.

And, later, she nails the foolishness of the ‘patent box’ trap that George Osborne has recently walked into:

This policy, which greatly reduces tax on income generated from patented goods, increases business profits even more while doing little or nothing to increase private sector investment in innovation (the goal of the policy). Patents are already monopolies: policies must target not the income they generate (protected for 20 years!) but the research that leads to them–especially in a country like Italy that has one of the lowest business sector spends on R&D. Instead, this policy will only reduce government revenue, forcing cuts elsewhere in order to remain ‘on target’ with the deficit.

Another example of business getting its way in a period in which governments are starving for growth, is the other side of the Jobs Act which reduces taxes for private equity, crowdfinancing, and venture capital funds, as though these are the secret to innovation financing. The reality is that what is required by both small high growth innovative companies is patient long term committed finance, not the increasingly speculative VC model that focuses only on the ‘exit’ phase. Yet the wrong model of what drives growth–an obsession with SMEs and VC– has seen the time that private equity has to be invested from 10 to 2 years to receive capital gains tax reductions–causing many of these companies to focus on short term returns.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Labour party which understood some of this stuff?

How the unthinkable becomes thinkable

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From the Christmas Edition of the New Yorker:

It’s hard to describe it as a positive development when a branch of the federal government releases a four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-page report that explains, in meticulous detail, how unthinkable cruelty became official U.S. policy. But last Tuesday, in releasing the long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation-and-detention program, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee chairman, proved that Congress can still perform its most basic Madisonian function of providing a check on executive-branch abuse, and that is reason for gratitude.

And…

The report also demonstrates that the agency misrepresented nearly every aspect of its program to the Bush Administration, which authorized it, to the members of Congress charged with overseeing it, and to the public, which was led to believe that whatever the C.I.A. was doing was vital for national security and did not involve torture. Instead, the report shows, in all twenty cases most widely cited by the C.I.A. as evidence that abusive interrogation methods were necessary, the same information could have been obtained, and frequently was obtained, through non-coercive methods. Further, the interrogations often produced false information, ensnaring innocent people, sometimes with tragic results.

Other documents illustrate how the agency misled. In June of 2003, the Vice-President’s counsel asked the C.I.A’.s general counsel if the agency was videotaping its waterboarding sessions. His answer was no. That was technically true, since it was not videotaping them at the time. But it had done so previously, and it had the tapes. The C.I.A. used the same evasion on Senate overseers. A day after a senator proposed a commission to look into detainee matters, the tapes were destroyed. Similar deceptions on many levels are so rife in the report that a reader can’t help but wonder if agency officials didn’t simply regard their cloak of state secrecy as a license to circumvent accountability.

So, will anything change?

It remains to be seen, though, whether the report will spur lasting reform. Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and an expert on torture regimes, doubts that it will. For one thing, despite McCain’s testimony, torture is becoming just another partisan issue. This wasn’t always the case—it was Ronald Reagan who signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in 1988. But polls show both a growing acceptance of the practice and a widening divide along party lines. “It’s becoming a lot like the death penalty,” Rejali said.

All of which brings me to our current ‘debate’ (such as it is) about online surveillance. It’s interesting to see how affronted contemporary officials and government ministers become at any suggestion that the agencies are not behaving ethically or even legally. The response is to assert indignantly that such behaviour is unthinkable and that it is outrageous even to hint that some officials might behave badly.

Which makes me wonder if all these righteous protesters are either in denial or suffering from a bad case of collective amnesia. It’s not so long ago, for example, that the senior ranks of MI6 harboured a nest of Soviet spies. And I can’t think of a public or semi-public agency in recent years — the BBC, the Metropolitan Police, the Press Complaints Commission, the South Yorkshire police force, the Care Quality Commission), the Catholic church and MPs to name just seven — that has not done things or condoned behaviour that, when exposed, has been deemed unthinkable, unethical or incompetent.

Given what we now know about the recent history of our institutions, it seems statistically improbable that analogous malefaction is not going on in their contemporary equivalents. At any rate, it seems to me to be the most rational default assumption. Why should we believe any assurances from public or corporate spokespersons any more?

The Afghan shambles, and what it means

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One of the astonishing things about democracies is the way in which those in government are allowed to get away with talking nonsense, especially if that nonsense involves ‘national security’, ‘defence’ or war. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence that the British adventure in Afghanistan made no sense, and all that ministerial guff about having British boots on the ground in that benighted land making the streets of Britain safer was pure baloney. And yet ministers from the PM down continued solemnly to intone it, and journalists reported it without much in the way of critical comment.

And now we’re ‘out’ of Afghanistan with nothing to show for it except humiliation, death, injury and humiliation.

Will Hutton has a good column about this in Sunday’s Observer. Excerpt:

None of the multiple and varying objectives set by three prime ministers and six defence secretaries through our engagement in Helmand province over eight years has been met, yet cumulatively it has cost at least £40bn. The bravery of British soldiers cannot be doubted: 453 have died; 247 have had limbs amputated; 2,600 have been wounded. Tragically, many uncounted thousands of Afghans have been killed; too few of them were fighters enlisted by the Taliban.

There is no improved government in Helmand. There has been no hoped-for economic reconstruction: heroin production is higher than it was. The violence between tribes, families and warlords is more entrenched. Helmand is more of a recruiting sergeant for terrorism and jihadism than it was; there have been no security gains. The central government in Kabul is more rather than less threatened. If one aim was to make the British homeland safer by victory in southern Afghanistan – a fantastical claim of last resort – Britain is now less safe.

More widely, our failure in Helmand, following on from the disaster in Basra where our forces were beaten back to the airbase outside the city and only the intervention of the US army allowed an orderly exit, has led to America’s profound re-evaluation of our usefulness as an ally. Tony Blair’s key aims for first invading Iraq to quest for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and then pivoting into Afghanistan was to prove to the US that we were stalwart allies, consolidate the “special relationship” and so maintain Britain’s standing as a co-upholder, if junior partner, of the world order. In this, he was solidly supported by the “strategists” in the Ministry of Defence and leading generals anxious to defend their budgets.

All that has been completely dashed. Frank Ledwidge in his passionate and revelatory book ‘Investment in Blood’ (the source of the figures above) quotes former vice chief of staff of the US army General Jack Keane speaking at a conference at Sandhurst in late 2013 about the twin debacles of Basra and Helmand: “Gentleman, you let us down; you let us down badly.” Ledwidge continues, having spoken to many senior American military leaders: “This is a common view among senior American soldiers.” The US commander in Afghanistan, General Dan K McNeill, is uncompromising, cited by Jack Fairweather in his no less astounding ‘The Good War’: the British “made a mess of things in Helmand”. Afghanistan has left the special relationship in tatters.

Interesting also to hear soldiers who have served in Afghanistan talk about it. It’s clear that they yearn for a convincing story that would justify the death and mutilation of their comrades. But no such story is forthcoming, for the simple reason that none exists.

Piketty on the Middle East

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From an interesting interview with Owen Jones:

The other influence is perhaps more surprising: the first Gulf war that followed Ba’athist Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which shocked him and his colleagues at the école. “It was a very strong event, because sometimes we say that governments cannot do much against tax havens, they’re too powerful. And suddenly we’re able to send 1 million troops 1,000km away from home to give back the oil to the emir of Kuwait. I was not sure this was the right redistribution of wealth.”

The west’s general relationship with the Middle East – “the most unequal region in the world”, he says – is one that troubles him, not least because it exposes grotesque inequalities. “Take Egypt: the total budget for education for 100 million people is 100 times less than the oil revenue for a few dozen people in Qatar. And then in London and in Paris we are happy to have these people buying football clubs and buying apartments, and then we are surprised that the youths in the Middle East don’t take very seriously our democracy and social justice.”